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At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Vanta CPO on product leadership, AI tools, and career growth
- Product management evolved from waterfall PRDs and inward decision-making to broader PM scope, stronger design partnership, and tighter customer-and-business accountability.
- AI prototyping and coding tools (e.g., v0, Lovable, Bolt, Cursor) are changing how product, design, and engineering overlap, enabling faster prototyping and shorter feedback loops.
- Career progression in product often hinges on creating focus (learning to say no), making hard cuts (even in your own area), rotating to learn new domains, and expanding into end-to-end business ownership.
- At exec levels, impact comes from staying close to the product while owning pricing/packaging, go-to-market alignment, customer roadmap communication, and always-on operational accountability.
- Vanta’s growth is driven by automating painful compliance workflows for startups while expanding into broader “trust management” pillars for enterprises, with an emphasis on UX craft and platform foundations.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasFocus is a career accelerant: learn to say no early.
Epling’s first promotion came from demonstrating prioritization discipline; leadership rewards PMs who reduce noise, clarify what matters, and protect teams from low-value work.
Cutting your own roadmap can signal strategic maturity.
He earned advancement by recommending large scope reductions and reorienting effort to higher-leverage work, showing he could evaluate impact beyond local team momentum.
AI tools make “seeing is believing” practical at speed.
Giving every PM access to tools like v0 enabled rapid interactive prototypes that can be shown to customers for immediate feedback, reducing dependence on long documents as the primary artifact.
Role boundaries will blur, but accountability should stay clear.
Epling welcomes overlap (PMs prototyping, designers contributing closer to implementation) while maintaining design accountability for the shipped experience—not just the Figma deliverable.
Exec impact scales through business ownership, not feature output.
VP/CPO work expands into pricing/packaging, sales enablement, solution engineering alignment, customer roadmap calls, and narrative clarity for CEOs—without losing product closeness.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesI remember the first promotion I got at Microsoft, and I remember one of the things my manager said with me that obviously I've never forgotten was like, "You're getting this promotion because you've, like, learned how to say no."
— Jeremy Epling
This process is extremely hard and, you know, takes months and months and, like, a year or more. It costs $100,000 or more, and we're like, "Hey, how can we bring software automation to this?"
— Jeremy Epling
If you're comfortable, that should be some level of a warning sign to you that, like, you have now learned everything you need to go learn.
— Jeremy Epling
They build these great HR systems that are, like, you know, like MMO RPGs, where there's, like, twice the amount of levels and you're slowly moving up and you're always just about to get the next promotion.
— Jeremy Epling
I think that's when things get bad, when it feels like you're just a translation layer, you know?
— Jeremy Epling
SPEAKERS
Jeremy Epling
guestChief Product Officer at Vanta; former VP Product at GitHub and longtime Microsoft product leader.
Aakash Gupta
hostProduct leader and podcast/newsletter host focused on product management and career growth.
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
